Mark Twain, a Biography — Volume III, Part 1: 1900-1907 eBook

We drove to the hotel and dined that night with the
Dodges, who had been neighbors at Riverdale.
Later, the usual crowd of admirers gathered around
him, among them I remember the minister from Costa
Rica, the Italian minister, and others of the diplomatic
service, most of whom he had known during his European
residence. Some one told of traveling in India
and China, and how a certain Hindu “god”
who had exchanged autographs with Mark Twain during
his sojourn there was familiar with only two other
American names—­George Washington and Chicago;
while the King of Siam had read but three English
books—­the Bible, Bryce’s American
Commonwealth, and The Innocents Abroad.

We were at Thomas Nelson Page’s for dinner next
evening—­a wonderfully beautiful home, full
of art treasures. A number of guests had been
invited. Clemens naturally led the dinner-talk,
which eventually drifted to reading. He told
of Mrs. Clemens’s embarrassment when Stepniak
had visited them and talked books, and asked her what
her husband thought of Balzac, Thackeray, and the
others. She had been obliged to say that he had
not read them.

“‘How interesting!’ said Stepniak.
But it wasn’t interesting to Mrs. Clemens.
It was torture.”

He was light-spirited and gay; but recalling Mrs.
Clemens saddened him, perhaps, for he was silent as
we drove to the hotel, and after he was in bed he
said, with a weary despair which even the words do
not convey:

“If I had been there a minute earlier, it is
possible—­it is possible that she might
have died in my arms. Sometimes I think that perhaps
there was an instant—­a single instant—­when
she realized that she was dying and that I was not
there.”

In New York I had once brought him a print of the
superb “Adams Memorial,” by Saint-Gaudens—­the
bronze woman who sits in the still court in the Rock
Creek Cemetery at Washington.

On the morning following the Page dinner at breakfast,
he said:

“Engage a carriage and we will drive out and
see the Saint-Gaudens bronze.”

It was a bleak, dull December day, and as we walked
down through the avenues of the dead there was a presence
of realized sorrow that seemed exactly suited to such
a visit. We entered the little inclosure of cedars
where sits the dark figure which is art’s supreme
expression of the great human mystery of life and
death. Instinctively we removed our hats, and
neither spoke until after we had come away. Then:

“What does he call it?” he asked.

I did not know, though I had heard applied to it that
great line of Shakespeare’s—­“the
rest is silence.”

“But that figure is not silent,” he said.

And later, as we were driving home:

“It is in deep meditation on sorrowful things.”

When we returned to New York he had the little print
framed, and kept it always on his mantelpiece.